George Gage with two attendants by Anthony van Dyck

Anthony Van Dyck’s portrait in the National Gallery, London, catalogued as showing George Gage with two attendants, has been acclaimed as an ‘ambitious and innovative’ production of his early years (Pl 3).1 In this unusual ‘conversation piece’, displaying the lively interaction of three figures, Van Dyck portrays the principal subject of the paintings: a youngish man, wrapped in a stylish black cloak, in a pose conveying the innate grace, but also the skilfully-crafted nonchalance, or sprezzatura, of a courtier. The man’s gaze, in contrast, is intently focused on a figure on the right of the painting. This second figure leans forward, urgently and insistently drawing the attention of the first to an Antique statue he is holding.2 In the background between the two, a third figure – of African origin – can be made out. While less conspicuous than the other two, his gaze is nevertheless directed at the viewer; he laughs while pointing, presumably dismissively, to the statue.

Attribution of the painting to Van Dyck has rarely been doubted, and it can be deduced that the scene depicts that of an intense debate over the purchase or authenticity of a work of art.3 Written documentation, however, for both the identification of the principal figure and also for the provenance of the painting during almost the first 200 years of its existence has so far been lacking. Hitherto, the first recorded reference to the painting is an item recorded in the posthumous sale in 1795 of Sir Joshua Reynolds’s collection of Old Masters. In the catalogue for that sale the painting was listed as a portrait by Van Dyck of ‘Rubens, half-length with two other artists’.4 This unconvincing identification of the principal figure as Rubens persisted for many years. In 1931 Ludwig Burchard suggested that the figure could be that of Daniel Nijs (1572–1647), the art collector and dealer who was Charles I’s agent in the purchase of the Mantuan collection.5 Since it bore little resemblance to a contemporary depiction of Nijs (Pl 1), this hypothesis also lacked credibility.6

But in 1969 Oliver Millar observed that principal figure in the painting was leaning on an ‘ancient sarcophagus’ displaying the upper part of the coat of arms of the Gage family of Firle in Sussex. He suggested the possibility that the principal figure was that of George Gage (1582–1638), son of one of the younger sons of that family, a distinguished art dealer and diplomat, described as ‘a graceful person, [of] good address, well skilled in music, painting and architecture … a master in Latin, French, Italian and Spanish’.7 Millar details Gage’s activities between 1616 and 1617 in negotiating pictures from Rubens and other artists on behalf of Sir Dudley Carleton. ‘George Gage’, he claims, ‘knew his way round the Antwerp studios.’ Millar suggests that during those years, and again in 1620, Gage must have met Van Dyck in Rubens’s studio.8

Contemporary sources reveal that Gage, a guest of the Earl and Countess of Arundel in Rome in 1614, and by 1623 travelling in the company of the Countess, was also well acquainted with the Arundels, the greatest of the English collectors. David Howarth has therefore speculated that in 1620 it was Gage, of all of the Earl of Arundel’s agents on the continent, who was most likely to have recommended Van Dyck to Arundel in England.10 But, most significantly, Van Dyck himself has documented his connection to Gage. In a dedication to Gage in 1635 of Vorsterman’s engraving of his Lamentation, Van Dyck records a deep and lasting bond of friendship between the two, one formed earlier in Rome. ‘Perillustri apud Anglos Domino D Georgio Gagi mutuae consuetudinis olim in Urbe [Rome] contractae, nunc perpetuum eisdem amoris argumentum’ (To Mr George Gage, most highly regarded among the English, as a lasting token of the mutual sympathies once established in the Eternal City and of the same affection now). The ‘mutuae consuetudinis’ must have developed in 1622, the date given to the painting by most recent studies, when both Van Dyck and Gage were in Rome together.11

Millar’s identification of the principal figure in the portrait with that of George Gage rests on the heraldic reference to the Gage family in the painting, and has not been universally accepted. Gregory Martin has challenged the whole basis of Millar’s argument, postulating that the architectural motif in the painting was pseudo-Antique in reference rather than specifically heraldic in meaning and thus can provide no guide to the identity of a family, still less the principal figure in the portrait.12 But most opinion has tended to agree with Millar. It seems unlikely that elements of the Gage coat of arms (a saltire, a ram’s horn and possibly a sun in splendour) were assembled by chance and not deliberately selected to convey a personal reference. Howarth suggests that in his Continence of Scipio, painted in 1620, Van Dyck might similarly have depicted an architectural fragment of Arundel’s in order to refer to his commissioning of the painting for the Duke of Buckingham.13 Certainly, if the reference to the Gage family is accepted, George Gage was uniquely qualified to be the subject of the portrait; no other member of his family is known to have had connections with the art collecting world of the early 17th century, still less a deep friendship with Van Dyck himself. Here for the first time, documentary evidence will be offered to corroborate Millar’s identification of the portrait with the Gage family and thus with George Gage himself.

Philip Sidney, 3rd Earl of Leicester (1619–1698), was one of the most avid art collectors in late-17th-century England, amassing a collection of several thousand works of art: paintings, drawings, prints and statuary, at his London residence of Leicester House (Pl 2).14 Just a few days before his death in March 1698, Leicester added a final codicil to his will of 1684. In this he not only generously increased legacies to his family and servants, but also bequeathed a number of named paintings – all chosen for their appropriateness – as mementoes to his closest and most favoured relatives. He left to his nephew Robert Spencer, 2nd Earl of Sunderland (1641–1702), ‘his special friend and relation’ and an enthusiast for Italian art, a version of Guido Reni’s Susanna and the Elders. To his grandson John Sidney (1680–1727), he left the ‘picture of Sir John Sidney by old Hilliard’. To his nephew and executor Thomas Pelham (1653–1712), son of Sir John Pelham (1624–1703), 3rd baronet, of Halland, Sussex, and Leicester’s sister, Lady Lucy (née Sidney), he left ‘the picture done by Vandike of Sir John [sic] Gage in three Heads’.15

Perhaps Thomas Pelham was assigned the portrait simply because he had always admired it. But he had also a particular link to the portrait: Firle, the home of the main branch of the Gage family was less than six miles from Halland, the seat of the enterprising and prosperous Pelhams. It seems probable that Leicester bequeathed the painting to his nephew at least in part for its local connection. It might be the case that the gift was designed as a celebration of neighbourly friendship. But the two families, although both among the leading gentry families of the county, differed greatly over religion and politics. The Gages were staunch Roman Catholics. In the Civil Wars, the family at Firle had adopted a strategy of isolation and neutrality in order to weather the storm; by the late 17th century, the head of the family, the 4th baronet, Sir John Gage, was a supporter of James II.16 The Pelhams, on the other hand, puritan in sympathy, had been active on the side of Parliament in the 1640s and by the end of the 17th century were identified with the dominant Whig interest.17 The gift of the portrait, aesthetically a more ambitious a work of art than anything then owned by the Gages and inherited from an aristocratic uncle, might have been particularly appreciated by Thomas, not so much as an illustration of local friendship but rather as a trophy demonstrating Pelham family superiority in the competition for status and leadership in the county community.

Whatever the reason for Leicester’s selection of the painting as an appropriate legacy for his nephew, this bequest of one of his works of art – documented as a Van Dyck portrait of a Gage with two other figures – can fairly confidently be identified with that of the National Gallery’s George Gage with two attendants.18 Even if the particular connection with George himself had been forgotten (or confused), this bequest in Leicester’s will provides the earliest documentary evidence that at the end of the 17th century the painting was known as a portrait by Van Dyck of a member of the Gage family – a member who must surely have been George Gage.

Provenance3 George Gage with two attendants by Anthony van Dyck

The history of the painting between its execution in Rome in 1622 and its re-appearance in London in the sale of Reynolds’s collection in 1795 has likewise never been documented. Nevertheless, from 1698 until 1795 its whereabouts can be traced with reasonable certainty. Having been acquired by Thomas Pelham in 1698, it seems to have remained in the Pelham family for two generations. Thomas inherited the baronetcy on his father’s death in 1703 and, maintaining his family’s upward mobility, in 1706 was elevated to the peerage as 1st Baron Pelham of Laughton. On his death in 1712 he left his inherited lands and property – which would have included the portrait of George Gage – to his eldest son, Thomas Pelham (1693–1768), and money from his personal estate to his other children.19 But not only did his son and heir inherit the Pelham title and estates in Sussex, he also inherited a new title and vast estates in the midlands from his mother’s brother, John Holles (1662–1711), 1st Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (in a second creation of the title), whose surname he added to his own.

The new duke (also confusingly entitled 1st Duke of Newcastle, but in the third creation of the title), spent the rest of his life absorbed in national politics. For over 40 years from 1717 to 1762 he was one of the leading figures in the Whig administrations that governed Britain in the mid-18th century. But the pursuit of power led him to neglect his estates and to dissipate his wealth in the lavish entertainments and generosity he found necessary to fund his political career. His income, estimated at a huge £32,000 a year in 1717, had been reduced to £9,000 a year by the time of his death in 1768; by then his debts have been reckoned at over £79,000.20 Childless, and with his widow provided for, the Duke charged his executors in his will to sell his real and personal estates so that his debts be ‘fully paid’.21 Within a year of his death, the household effects of Newcastle House, Lincolns Inn Fields, his elegantly furnished London residence and the centre of his political entertaining, as well as those of his suburban house, Claremont, near Hampton Court, were sold. Shortly afterwards, the houses themselves were sold. 22

It can be surmised that during his career the duke had removed George Gage from the Pelham family home at Halland to add to the decorative splendour of Newcastle House (or perhaps Claremont), and that it was from the sale of their contents that Reynolds bought the painting. No catalogue survives of the sale, but Francis Broun has found confirmation of the purchase by Reynolds from the Duke’s goods. According to Broun, Reynolds added a note in his copy of Walpole’s Anecdotes of Painting in England at a passage referring to Van Dyck’s portrait of Rubens’s wife: ‘He [Van Dyck] drew likewise Rubens’ picture ½ length and in the same picture Martin Vander Enden bringing in a small statue. This was in the possession of the duke of Newcastle at whose sale it was purchased by Sir Joshua Reynolds.’23 The reference to the ‘small statue’ certainly identifies the painting, although Maarten van den Enden (1605–1673), the Antwerp printer and publisher, would have been too young to have been the secondary figure in the painting.

On at least one occasion, Reynolds had been employed by the Duke, and would thus probably have seen the painting in situ at Newcastle House and welcomed the chance to buy it later.24 But it seems he was never close enough to the Duke to have been commissioned to paint his portrait when perhaps he might have learnt of the Gage connection – if indeed the Duke himself had any memory of it. It can be conjectured that, on the strength of Walpole’s reference to a Van Dyck portrait of Rubens’s wife, Reynolds surmised that his purchase from the Duke’s sale was a Van Dyck portrait of Rubens himself. All connection with the Gage family was thus lost until Millar’s recognition of the Gage coat-of-arms in 1969.

It has been argued here that, from 1698 to 1824, the portrait of George Gage had travelled from Leicester House, London, to Halland, Sussex, from there back to London and to Newcastle House, Lincoln’s Inn Fields (or Claremont, Hampton Court), then on to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s house at 31 Leicester Fields, and finally to its home in the newly founded National Gallery. But when and how it had been acquired by Philip Sidney, 3rd Earl of Leicester, in the earlier 17th century is undocumented and remains obscure. The painting, either commissioned by Gage himself, or presented to the sitter as a gift from Van Dyck in token of their friendship, was presumably brought back to England from Rome by Gage after its completion in 1622. At the time it was painted, Gage was present in Rome on a major diplomatic mission: securing a papal dispensation to allow the Infanta Maria of Spain to marry James I’s son, Charles, Prince of Wales. In 1623 Gage returned triumphantly to London with the dispensation, but the refusal of the Infanta to contemplate marriage with a heretic, and the furious opposition of the English public to the marriage of the heir to the throne to a Roman Catholic princess, ruined his efforts.

Gage was known for his faith – though he was probably not a priest as was once thought – and from then onwards was too compromised by his Catholicism to be employed on further diplomatic missions.25 Instead, fragmentary evidence indicates that he retained his artistic interests, contributing, for instance, to the completion of a painting for the Earl of Arundel and acting as architect for the Countess of Arundel’s rebuilding of Tart Hall, her London ‘casino’.26 He also developed a career as a business entrepreneur and, among other ventures, became the manager of a company awarded the monopoly of soap-making in 1632. Unlikely though this undertaking sounds, the list of his fellow monopolists reveals their common bond as Catholics and gentry.27 Although the business failed, Gage himself apparently prospered and was able to build himself a fine house in St Giles-in-the-Fields. But in 1638 he was struck down with a sudden illness and died within a month. In his will made just before his death he ordered his executors to sell all his property and goods – including presumably his portrait by Van Dyck – in order to pay his debts and provide legacies for named friends and servants.28

A number of possible options can be suggested for the fate of the portrait over the following years. With no established art market in London at the time, it seems probable that the painting would have been offered to an existing art collector or someone with a personal connection to Gage. Those most likely to be interested would have been Gage’s patrons and friends the Arundels, and in particular the Countess. But in 1641 as the political situation deteriorated, the Countess was to leave England, taking many of her valuable possessions with her. Following her death in exile in Amsterdam in 1654, in April 1655 an inventory of her possessions, which by then also included much of her husband’s great collection, listed a ‘ritratto de Mr Gage’.29

It is possible that this was the painting later acquired by the future 3rd Earl of Leicester, then entitled Lord Viscount Lisle, and the one subsequently bequeathed to his Pelham nephew. By the mid-17th century, Lisle was already an enthusiastic collector of works of art. During the Interregnum he purchased over a hundred items – paintings, Antique statuary and gems, as well as renaissance bronzes – from the sale of the ‘Late King’s Goods’ (all of which had to be returned to the crown on the Restoration in 1660).30 But from 1642 onwards he had also been a committed parliamentarian and, for the greater part of the Interregnum from 1649–1659, a member of the governing councils of state. In October 1658 he was able to obtain permission – no doubt with his own interests in mind – from his colleagues on the council to allow Nicholas Lanier, formerly Charles I’s Master of Music, but then currently exiled in the Netherlands and acting as an agent for art collectors, to import works of art. Such importation was, at the time, normally prohibited. A similar though unattributed request – but one also almost certainly made by Lisle – had been agreed to by the Council of State in August 1655.31 Inheritance of the Arundel collections was the subject of prolonged family litigation, but an unknown number of works of art were apparently disposed of by the countess’s only surviving son, Lord Stafford, following her death. It could therefore have been the case that Lanier himself (or some intermediary) acquired the ‘Mr Gage’, from Stafford, and with the Council’s permission was able to send it (and no doubt other works of art) back to England and to a welcome place in Lord Lisle’s growing collection.

But the story is not quite so straightforward. There seems to have been another portrait of George Gage, painted by Rubens, which exists today in two versions. Jan-Albert Goris and Julius Held first noted the resemblance of an unknown man in a portrait by Rubens in the Dayton Art Institute, Ohio, to the principal figure in Van Dyck’s George Gage with two attendants in London (Pl 4).32 The Dayton Art Institute currently, but improbably, identifies the sitter as Daniel Nijs.33 Natalya Gritsay, however, more confidently notes the ‘indubitable likeness’ of the other version of the same portrait, now in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, to the Van Dyck portrait of George Gage.34 Allowing that the painting is in fact of Gage, he could well have kept one of the versions of this portrait at his house in St Giles-in-the-Fields in addition to the Van Dyck painting. Both of these would have been disposed of by his executors after his death. Thus the unattributed ‘ritratto de Mr Gage’ listed in the Arundel inventory could have been one of the two versions by Rubens, rather than the portrait by Van Dyck. It was quite likely that the Arundels would have wanted to acquire a Rubens portrait of Gage, given their connections with both painter and sitter. But, as noted above, the 1655 Inventory is known to have been an incomplete record of the Countess’s possessions. There remains therefore another possibility: that she did in fact have in her possession both the Van Dyck portrait as well as one of the two portraits by Rubens, the former one of the number omitted from the inventory, but the one which might have been acquired by Lanier and sold to Lisle.

Alternatively, the portrait remained in England all the time, sold in 1638 to an unknown English buyer, later passing into Lisle’s possession. Lisle could not have bought the painting from the sale in 1638 of Gage’s goods; he was only nineteen at the time, without an income of his own, and was in any case abroad from 1636 until 1640. But by the 1650s, if not by the late 1640s, he was wealthy and well connected enough to pursue his passion for the collecting of works of art. At the Restoration in 1660, as he explained to the Earl of Ormond (no doubt anxious to exculpate himself from the embarrassment of his extensive purchases of ‘the Late King’s Goods’), ‘I have, my lord, for some years past been a collector of such things [paintings and statuary] continually almost, buying some in such places as I met with them.’35 This suggests that during the 1650s, in addition to the goods he had purchased from the Commonwealth sale, he was buying works of art to be found in England as well as those imported by Lanier. Certainly, in spite of the return of Lisle’s impressive collection of former royal works of art to the crown in 1660, in 1678 John Evelyn was nevertheless able to admire the ‘diverse, rare works’ then housed in Lisle’s country house at Sheen, Richmond.36

In the absence of further information, the fate of Van Dyck’s portrait of George Gage with two attendants in the early 17th century will remain a mystery. But this account has provided documentary evidence for the first time that, at some point over the second half of the century, the painting was acquired and recorded by Philip Sidney, 3rd Earl of Leicester, as a Van Dyck portrait of a member of the Gage family; and it has been argued that George Gage was uniquely placed to have been the subject of the portrait. The painting was bequeathed by Leicester to his Pelham nephew and from the sale of his son’s possessions acquired by Joshua Reynolds, its earlier identification forgotten. For all its owners this engaging work was perhaps a prized possession to be as ‘greatly esteemed’ by them as by Reynolds. But for Philip Sidney, 3rd Earl of Leicester, an enthusiastic collector of works of art, this elegant depiction of an art collector displaying the discriminating expertise of an aristocratic connoisseur in a debate over a work of art must have held a particular resonance and attraction.

I would like to acknowledge with grateful thanks Jeremy Wood for his invaluable help in the writing of this article; responsibility for remaining errors is of course mine alone. I would also like to record, with many thanks, my great gratitude to Viscount De L’Isle for granting permission for the reproduction of the portrait of the 3rd Earl of Leicester from his private collection.

2 Identified as a reduced version of the Aphrodite, one of the Arundel marbles in the Ashmolean Museum, David Howarth, Lord Arundel and his Circle, New Haven and London 1985, p158.

3 Gregory Martin, The Flemish School, circa 1500-circa 1660, London 1986, p60, however, disputes the work as autograph, merely in the ‘manner of Van Dyck’. He argues that ‘the figures lack psychological coherence’ and also that ‘the situation is ambiguous’.

4 Algernon Graves and William V Cronin, A History of the Works of Sir Joshua Reynolds, P.R.A, 4 vols, London 1899–1901, IV, p1627. John Young, Catalogue of the Celebrated Pictures of the Late John Julius Angerstein London 1823, p48, ‘Formerly in the collection of Sir Joshua Reynolds, by whom it was greatly esteemed’. Bought by JJ Angerstein, the purchase of whose collection formed the first acquisition of the newly founded National Gallery.

6 Odoardo Fialetti, Daniel Nijs, frontispiece engraving, in Giulio C Gigli, La Pittura Trionfante, Venice 1615. This contemporary portrait depicts a somewhat stocky, older man with short, cropped hair, prominent waxed moustache and pointed beard. On the other hand the longer-limbed and more youthful subject of the Van Dyck painting sports a full head of wavy brown hair but light beard and scant moustache. For evidence of the authenticity of the Nijs engraving, ‘this honoured face has been cut from life by the chisel’, Christina M Anderson, The Flemish Merchant of Venice: Daniel Nijs and the Sale of the Gonzaga Art Collection, New Haven and London 2015, p65.

7 Joseph Gillow, A Literary and Biographical History or Biographical Dictionary of the English Catholics from the Breach with Rome, in 1534 to the Present Day, 5 vols, London 1885–1902, II, p357.

10 Howarth 1985, p156. Susan J Barnes, ‘Van Dyck and George Gage’, in Art and Patronage in the Caroline Courts: Essays in Honour of Sir Oliver Millar, ed David Howarth, Cambridge 1993, pp3–4, also suggests Gage was responsible for Van Dyck’s invitation to England in 1620, and perhaps acted as his mentor in London.

11 Author’s translation, Barnes 2004, p270.

12 Martin 1986, p60.

13 Howarth 1985, pp157, 196.

14 The attempt by Leicester (then known by his courtesy title of Lord Viscount Lisle), to create an art collection from the Commonwealth sales that followed the execution of Charles I was rediscovered by Francis Haskell and presented in his Paul Mellon Lectures, 1994, posthumously published in Francis Haskell, The King’s Pictures: the Formation and Dispersal of the Collections of Charles I and his Courtiers, ed Karen Serres, New Haven and London 2013, pp183–88. For a more comprehensive account of Leicester’s art collecting, see my article, ‘Philip Sidney, Lord Viscount Lisle, Third Earl of Leicester (1619–1698): a Seventeenth-century Sidney Collector of Art’, Sidney Journal, XXX, 2 (2015), pp103–27.

15 TNA, PRO PROB 11/444, fol 269r.

16 Arthur Oswald, Firle Place, Sussex, London 1955, p19.

17 Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex, 1600–1660, London 1975, pp13, 284–5, 93.

18 I am indebted to Jeremy Wood for his identification of this reference in Leicester’s will. Perhaps Leicester had always understood (or guessed) the principal figure in the painting to be George’s cousin, Sir John Gage (d 1633). Or, possibly on his deathbed, Leicester confused George’s name with that of the first name and title of the Hilliard miniature he bequeathed to his grandson.

24 John Ingamells, John Edgcumbe, The Letters of Sir Joshua Reynolds, New Haven and London 2000, p18.

25 AJ Loomie, ‘Gage, George (c1582-1638)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), online edn 2008, accessed 26 May 2015; P Revill, FW Steer, ‘George Gage I and George Gage II’, Historical Research, XXXI (1958), pp141–158, distinguish George Gage I, subject of the portrait, from his cousin, George Gage II, who was a priest and with whom the art agent has been wrongly conflated. William Prynne’s ranting reference in 1643 to the deceased ‘Lord [sic] Gage, a Jesuit and a priest’ with his palace in Queen’s Street sheltering 40 nuns is not to be taken as reliable evidence on George Gage I: William Prynne, Romes Master-peece, London 1643, p24.

27 A Short and True Relation concerning the Soap-business, London 1641, p4, complains that the ‘most part of them [were] Popish Recusants’, and that the patentees were ‘knights, esquires and gentlemen, never bred up to the trade’. The monopolists included Gage’s nephew, Sir Edward Stradling (1600–1644), of St Donats, Glamorganshire, and Gage’s fellow Catholic and business partner, Sir Richard Weston (1591–1652) of Sutton, Surrey. Gage, Weston among others, including Lord Maltravers, son of the Earl and Countess of Arundel, also invested capital in a fishing vessel: Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1625–29, p542.

28 TNA PROB 11/177/682; The house and its outbuildings were sold for the high price of £2,000: William E Riley, Survey of London, V, The Parish of St Giles-in-the-Fields, part ii, London 1914, p93–4.

30 Hilary Maddicott, ‘A Collection of the Interregnum Period: Philip, Lord Viscount Lisle and his Purchases from the “Late King’s Goods”, 1649–1660’, Journal of the History of Collections, XI (1999), pp1–24.

31 TNA PRO 31/17/33 p90; TNA SP 25/76, fol 695.

32 Jan-Albert Goris and Julius S Held, Rubens in America, New York 1947, p29; Michael Jaffé, Rubens Completo Catalogo, Milan 1989, no. 392, p221, also notes the similarity with the National Gallery portrait but includes Millar’s identification of its principal figure as Gage. Jaffé, however, cautiously observes that Millar’s identification of the principal figure as Gage rests solely upon the heraldic evidence in the painting. Similarity of facial features and distinctive style of hair (as illustrated by Pl 3 and Pl 4), strongly suggest that both portraits were of the same man although at a different age. The Rubens portrait would have been painted when Gage was in his early thirties; the Van Dyck when he was some seven years older.

33 Fifty Treasures of the Dayton Art Institute, Dayton Ohio 1969, p84; this identification derives from the adoption by Goris and Held of Burchard’s suggestion in 1931 that Nijs might have been the subject of the National Gallery portrait. For the unlikelihood of this identification see n6 above.